Moxi, healthcare robot created in Austin, completes 500k deliveries
AUSTIN, Texas — The future of human-robot collaboration is taking shape in Austin, Texas.
Moxi is a robot built, designed, and programmed by Diligent Robotics. Andrea Thomaz is the co-founder and CEO. “So Diligent Robotics is really bringing robots into work with teams of people, creating teammate robots that take on work that those teams of people don’t want to do,” Thomaz said.
Right now, Moxi is in more than 30 hospitals nationwide working with healthcare providers by taking menial tasks from nurses to enhance patient care. “So, we are really helping, we like to say, augment their workforce,” Thomaz said. “They’ve been in a critical crisis in terms of not having enough staff, burnout and what we want to do is help them make sure the people they do have are working most effectively.”
One of the roles Moxi is taking over is supply and medication delivery to hospital rooms.
At the end of last year, Moxi robots completed a half million deliveries across the fleet. “And that’s a half a million times that a nurse or a pharmacy tech got to stay in their department doing their real job and a robot was saving them 15 minutes, 20 minutes,” Thomaz said.
Moxi was deliberately designed to be smaller than most people with a wide face and compassionate eyes. Its program uses AI and machine learning to navigate hospitals. “As it learned how to open 300, 400, 500 doors across the country then you get to start to use those same models across the fleet,” Thomaz said.
She says the applications are endless as we launch into the robot age. “The time when we get to start thinking about how robots are going to enter society is now,” Thomaz said. “We have robots that are kind of ready to work alongside people and we get to define what that’s going to be like.”